If you get into the weeds of tax policy and had a contest for parts of the internal revenue code that are “boring but important,” depreciation would be at the top of the list. After all, how many people want to learn about America’s Byzantine system that imposes a discriminatory tax penalty on new investment? Yes, it’s a self-destructive policy that imposes a lot of economic damage, but even I’ll admit it’s not a riveting topic (though I tried to make it culturally relevant by using ABBA as an example).

In second place would be a policy called “deferral,” which deals with a part of the law that allows companies to delay an extra layer of tax that the IRS imposes on income that is earned – and already subject to tax – in other countries. It is “boring but important” because it has major implications on the ability of American-domiciled firms to compete for market share overseas.

Here’s a video that explains the issue, though feel free to skip it and continue reading if you already are familiar with how the law works.

The simple way to think of this eye-glazing topic is that “deferral” is a good policy that partially mitigates the impact of a bad policy known as “worldwide taxation.”

Unfortunately, good policy tends to be unpopular in Washington. This is why deferral (and related issues such as inversions, which occur for the simple reason that worldwide taxation creates a huge competitive disadvantage for U.S.-domiciled companies) is playing an unusually large role in the 2016 election and concomitant tax debates.

Apple CEO Tim Cook struck back at critics of the iPhone maker’s strategy to avoid paying U.S. taxes, telling The Washington Post in a wide ranging interview that the company would not bring that money back from abroad unless there was a “fair rate.”

Since the discussion is about income that Apple has earned in other nations (and therefore about income that already has been subject to all applicable taxes in other nations), the only “fair rate” from the United States is zero.

That’s because good tax systems are based on “territorial taxation” rather than “worldwide taxation.”

Though a worldwide tax system might not impose that much damage if a nation had a low corporate tax rate.

Unfortunately, that’s not a good description of the U.S. system, which has a very high rate, thus creating a big incentive to hold money overseas to avoid having to pay a very hefty second layer of tax to the IRS on income that already has been subject to tax by foreign governments.

Along with other multinational companies, the tech giant has been subject to criticism over a tax strategy that allows them to shelter profits made abroad from the U.S. corporate tax rate, which at 35 percent is among the highest in the developed world.

“Among”? I don’t know if this is a sign of bias or ignorance on the part of CNBC, but the U.S. unquestionably has the highest corporate tax rate among developed nations.

Anyhow, Mr. Cook points out that there’s nothing patriotic about needlessly paying extra tax to the IRS, especially when it would mean a very punitive tax rate.

…a few particularly strident critics have lambasted Apple as a tax dodger. …While some proponents of the higher U.S. tax rate say it’s unpatriotic for companies to practice inversions or shelter income, Cook hit back at the suggestion. “It is the current tax law. It’s not a matter of being patriotic or not patriotic,” Cook told The Post in a lengthy sit-down. “It doesn’t go that the more you pay, the more patriotic you are.” …Cook added that “when we bring it back, we will pay 35 percent federal tax and then a weighted average across the states that we’re in, which is about 5 percent, so think of it as 40 percent. We’ve said at 40 percent, we’re not going to bring it back until there’s a fair rate. There’s no debate about it.”

Cook may be right that there’s “no debate” about whether it’s sensible for a company to keep money overseas to guard against bad tax policy.

But there is a debate about whether politicians will make the law worse in a grab for more revenue.

Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, doesn’t understand the issue. He wrote an editorial asserting that Apple is engaging in a “rip-off.”

…the heart of this mess is the big dog of tax rip-offs – tax deferral. This is the rule that encourages American multinational corporations to keep their profits overseas instead of investing them here at home, and it does so by granting them $80 billion a year in tax breaks. This policy…defies common sense. …some of the most profitable companies in the world can put off paying taxes indefinitely while hardworking Americans must pay their taxes every year. …that system creates a perverse incentive to keep corporate profits overseas instead of investing here at home.

I agree with him that the current system creates a perverse incentive to keep money abroad.

But you don’t solve that problem by imposing unconstrained worldwide taxation, which would create a perverse incentive structure that discourages American-domiciled firms from competing for market share in other nations.

Amazingly, Senator Wyden actually claims that making the system more punitive would help make America a better place to do business.

…ending deferral is a necessary step in making sure…the U.S. maintains its position as the best place to do business.

Though I guess we need to give Wyden credit for honesty. He admits that what he really wants is for Washington to have more money to spend.

Ending deferral will also generate money from existing deferred taxes to pay for rebuilding our country’s crumbling infrastructure. …This is a priority that almost all tax reform proposals have called for.

By the way, can you guess which presidential candidate agrees with Senator Wyden and wants to impose full and immediate worldwide taxation?

If you answered Hillary Clinton, you’re right. But if you answered Donald Trump, that also would be a correct answer.

The Wall Street Journalopines on the issue and is especially unimpressed by Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible approach on the issue.

Mrs. Clinton is targeting so-called inversions, where U.S.-based companies move their headquarters by buying an overseas competitor, as well as foreign takeovers of U.S. firms for tax considerations. These migrations are the result of a U.S. corporate-tax code that supplies incentives to migrate… The Democrat would impose what she calls an “exit tax” on businesses that relocate outside the U.S., which is the sort of thing banana republics impose when their economies sour. …Mrs. Clinton wants to build a tax wall to stop Americans from escaping. “If they want to go,” she threatened in Michigan, “they’re going to have to pay to go.”

Ugh, making companies “pay to go” is an unseemly sentiment. Sort of what you might expect from a place like Venezuela where politicians treat private firms as a source of loot for their cronies.

…the U.S. taxes residents—businesses and individuals—on their world-wide income, not merely the income that they earned in the U.S. …the U.S. taxes companies headquartered in the U.S. far more than companies based in other countries. Thirty-one of the 34 OECD countries have cut corporate taxes since 2000, leaving the U.S. with the highest rate in the industrialized world. The U.S. system of world-wide taxation means that a company that moves from Dublin, Ohio, to Dublin, Ireland, will pay a rate that is less than a third of America’s. A dollar of profit earned on the Emerald Isle by an Irish-based company becomes 87.5 cents after taxes, which it can then invest in Ireland or the U.S. or somewhere else. But if the company stays in Ohio and makes the same buck in Ireland, the after-tax return drops to 65 cents or less if the money is invested in America.

But there is something even worse, a Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters that has existed for decades but recently has been dangerously modified. MCMAATM is a clunky acronym, however, so let’s go with GATCA. That’s because this agreement, along with companion arrangements, would lead to a Global Tax Compliance Act.

Let’s learn more about this bad idea, which will become binding on America if approved by the Senate.

James Jatras explains this dangerous proposal in a column for Accounting Today.

Treasury’s real agenda is…a so-called “Protocol amending the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.” The Protocol, along with a follow-up “Competent Authority” agreement, is an initiative of the G20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the support, unsurprisingly, of the Obama Administration. …the Protocol cannot be repaired. It is utterly inconsistent with any concept of American sovereignty or Americans’ constitutional protections. Ratification of the Protocol would mean acceptance by the United States as a treaty obligation of an international “common reporting standard,” which is essentially FATCA gone global—sometimes called GATCA. Ratifying the Protocol arguably would also provide Treasury with backdoor legal authority to issue regulations requiring FATCA-like reporting to foreign governments by U.S. domestic banks, credit unions, insurance companies, mutual funds, etc. This would mean billions of dollars in costs passed on to American taxpayers and consumers, as well as mandating the delivery of private data to authoritarian and corrupt governments, including China, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Nigeria.

The Foreign Relations Committee unfortunately has approved the GATCA Protocol.

…the senator is right to insist that the OECD Protocol is dead on arrival.

Taxpayers all over the world owe him their gratitude.

In a column for Investor’s Business Daily, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center warns that this pernicious and risky global pact would give the IRS power to collect and automatically share massive amounts of our sensitive financial information with some of the world’s most corrupt, venal, and incompetent governments.

During a visit to the World Bank this week, I got a sobering lesson about the degree to which the people working at international bureaucracies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, dislike tax competition. For years, these organizations — which are funded with our hard-earned tax dollars — have bullied low-tax nations into changing their tax privacy laws so uncompetitive nations can track taxpayers and companies around the world. …they never tire of trying to raise taxes on everyone else. Take the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s latest attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all system of “automatic information exchange” that would necessitate the complete evisceration of financial privacy around the world. A goal of the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters is to impose a global network of data collection and dissemination to allow high-tax nations to double-tax and sometimes triple-tax economic activity worldwide. That would be a perfect tax harmonization scheme for politicians and a nightmare for taxpayers and the global economy.

But she closes with the good news.

Somehow the bureaucrats persuaded the lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to approve it. Thankfully, it’s currently being blocked by Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah.

Actually, all that’s being blocked is the ability to ram the Multilateral Convention through the Senate without any debate or discussion.

John Gray explains the procedural issues in a piece for Conservative Review.

Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT)…aren’t blocking these treaties at all. Instead, they are just objecting to the Senate ratifying them by “unanimous consent.” The Senate leadership has the authority to bring these tax treaties to the floor for full consideration – debate, amendments, and votes. That is what Senators Paul and Lee are asking for. …Unanimous consent means that the process takes all of about 10 seconds; there is no time to review the treaties, there is no time for debate, and not a second of time to offer amendments. They simply want them to be expedited through the Senate without transparency. …As sitting U.S. Senators, they have the right to ask for debate and amendments to these treaties. …These treaties are dangerous to our personal liberties. Senator Paul and Senator Lee deserve the transparency and debate they’ve requested.

Amen.

For those of us who want good tax policy, rejecting this pact is vital.

An ideal fiscal system not only has a low rate, but also taxes income only one time and only taxes income earned inside national borders.

But this isn’t just a narrow issue of tax policy. On the broader issue of privacy and government power, Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard makes some very strong points in a column for the South China Morning Post.

I should be a paid-up supporter of the campaign to close down tax havens. I should be glad to see the back of 500-euro bills. …Nevertheless, I am deeply suspicious of the concerted effort to address all these problems in ways that markedly increase the power of states – and not just any states but specifically the world’s big states – at the expense of both small states and the individual.

He cites two examples, starting with the intrusive plan in the U.K. to let anybody and everybody know the owners of property.

The British government announced it will set up a publicly accessible register of beneficial owners (the individuals behind shell companies). In addition, offshore shell companies and other foreign entities that buy or own British property will henceforth be obliged to declare their owners in the new register. No doubt these measures will flush out or deter some villains. But there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a foreign national to want to own a property in Britain without having his or her name made public. Suppose you were an apostate from Islam threatened with death by jihadists, for example.

…getting rid of bin Ladens is the thin end of a monetary wedge. …a number of economists…argue cash is an anachronism, heavily used in the black and grey economy, and easily replaced in an age of credit cards and electronic payments. But their motive is not just to shut down the mafia. It is also to increase the power of government. Without cash, no payment can be made without being recorded and potentially coming under official scrutiny. Without cash, central banks can much more easily impose negative interest rates, without fearing that bank customers may withdraw their money.

He’s right. The slippery slope is real. Giving governments some power invariably means giving governments a lot of power.

And that’s not a good idea if you’re a paranoid libertarian like me. But even if you have a more benign view of government, ask yourself if it’s a good idea to approve a global pact that is explicitly designed to help governments impose higher tax burdens?

Senators Paul and Lee are not allowing eight treaties to go forward without open debate and discussion. Seven of those pacts are bilateral agreements that easily could be tweaked and approved.

But the Protocol to the Multilateral Convention can’t be fixed. The only good outcome is defeat.

Imagine if you had the chance to play basketball against a superstar from the NBA like Stephen Curry.

No matter how hard you practiced beforehand, you surely would lose.

For most people, that would be fine. We would console ourselves with the knowledge that we tried our best and relish he fact that we even got the chance to be on the same court as a professional player.

But some people would want to cheat to make things “equal” and “fair.” So they would say that the NBA player should have to play blindfolded, or while wearing high-heeled shoes.

And perhaps they could impose enough restrictions on the NBA player that they could prevail in a contest.

But most of us wouldn’t feel good about “winning” that kind of battle. We would be ashamed that our “victory” only occurred because we curtailed the talents of our opponent.

Now let’s think about this unseemly tactic in the context of corporate taxation and international competitiveness.

So how does the Obama Administration want to address these problems? What’s their plan to reform the system to that American-based firms can better compete with companies from other countries?

Unfortunately, there’s no desire to make the tax code more competitive. Instead, the Obama Administration wants to change the laws to make it less attractive to do business in other nations. Sort of the tax version of hobbling the NBA basketball player in the above example.

The Administration proposes to supplement the existing subpart F regime with a per-country minimum tax on the foreign earnings of entities taxed as domestic C corporations (U.S. corporations) and their CFCs. …Under the proposal, the foreign earnings of a CFC or branch or from the performance of services would be subject to current U.S. taxation at a rate (not below zero) of 19 percent less 85 percent of the per-country foreign effective tax rate (the residual minimum tax rate). …The minimum tax would be imposed on current foreign earnings regardless of whether they are repatriated to the United States.

There’s a lot of jargon in those passages, and even more if you click on the underlying link.

So let’s augment by excerpting some of the remarks, at a recent Brookings Institution event, by the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs. Robert Stack was pushing the President’s agenda, which would undermine American companies by making it difficult for them to benefit from good tax policy in other jurisdictions.

He actually argued, for instance, that business tax reform should be “more than a cry to join the race to the bottom.”

In other words, he doesn’t (or, to be more accurate, his boss doesn’t) want to fix what’s wrong with the American tax code.

So he doesn’t seem to care that other nations are achieving good results with lower corporate tax rates.

I do not buy into the notion that the U.S. must willy-nilly do what everyone else is doing.

And he also criticizes the policy of “deferral,” which is a provision of the tax code that enables American-based companies to delay the second layer of tax that the IRS imposes on income that is earned (and already subject to tax) in other jurisdictions.

I don’t think it’s open to debate that the ability of US multinationals to defer income has been a dramatic contributor to global tax instability.

He doesn’t really explain why it is destabilizing for companies to protect themselves against a second layer of tax that shouldn’t exist.

But he does acknowledge that there are big supply-side responses to high tax rates.

The President’s global minimum tax proposal…permits tax-free repatriation of amounts earned in countries taxed at rates above the global minimum rate. …the global minimum tax plan also takes the benefit out of shifting income into low and no-tax jurisdictions by requiring that the multinational pay to the US the difference between the tax haven rate and the U.S. rate.

The bottom line is that American companies would be taxed by the IRS for doing business in low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Bermuda.

But if they do business in high-tax nations such as France, there’s no extra layer of tax.

The bottom line is that the U.S. tax code would be used to encourage bad policy in other countries.

Though Mr. Stack sees that as a feature rather than a bug, based on the preposterous assertion that other counties will grow faster if the burden of government spending is increased.

…the global minimum tax concept has an added benefit as well…protecting developing and low-income countries…so they can mobilize the necessary resources to grow their economies.

At a recent IMF symposium, the minimum tax was identified as something that could be of great help.

The bottom line is that the White House and the Treasury Department are fixated at hobbling competitors by encouraging higher tax rates around the world and making sure that American-based companies are penalized with an extra layer of tax if they do business in low-tax jurisdictions

For what it’s worth, the right approach, both ethically and economically, is for American policy makers to focus on fixing what’s wrong with the American tax system.

P.S. When I debunked Jeffrey Sachs on the “race to the bottom,” I showed that lower tax rates do not mean lower tax revenue.

Now the White House has produced an infographic designed to bolster its case against inversions, which I have reprinted to the right.

You can click on this link to see the full-sized version, but I thought the best approach would be to provide a “corrected” version.

So if you look below, you’ll find my version, featuring the original White House document on the left and my editorial commentary on the right.

But if you don’t want to read the document and my corrections, all you need to know is that the Obama Administration makes several dodgy assumptions and engages in several sins of omission. Here are the two biggest problems.

A major U.S. company merges with a foreign firm in part to avoid America’s punishing corporate tax code, and the politicians who refuse to reform the code denounce the company for trying to stay competitive. …Sigh. …Let’s try to explain one more time why it makes perfect business—and moral—sense… The U.S. federal corporate income tax rate is 35%. The Irish rate is 12.5%. …A CEO obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders cannot ignore this competitive reality.

But what do Sanders and Clinton think? Well, the editorial skewers the two leading Democratic candidates for their vacuous demagoguery.

…none of this business logic impressesHillary ClintonorBernie Sanders,who helped to write the U.S. tax code as Senators but are now competing as presidential candidates to see who can demagogue more ferociously against American employers. …Neither one wants to reform the tax code to make U.S. tax rates more competitive with the rest of the world. Instead they want to raise the costs of doing business even further. Mrs. Clinton’s solution is to raise taxes on investors with higher capital-gains taxes, block inversion deals, and apply an “exit tax” to businesses that manage to escape. Mr. Sanders would go further and perform an immediate $620 billion cashectomy on U.S. companies. The Vermonter would tax the money U.S. firms have earned overseas, even though that income has already been taxed in foreign jurisdictions.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think the ideas being peddled by Clinton and Sanders will lead to more and better jobs in the United States.

Which is why, when given the chance to write about this topic for Fortune, I suggested that it would be best to actually fix the tax code rather than blaming the victim.

Some U.S. politicians respond to these mergers with demagoguery about “economic treason,” but that’s silly. These corporate unions are basically the business version of a couple in a long-distance relationship that decides to live where the economic outlook is brighter after getting married. So instead of blaming the victims, the folks in Washington should do what’s right for the country by trying to deal with the warts that make America’s tax system so unappealing for multinational firms.

With a 35% levy from Washington, augmented by smaller state corporate taxes, the combined burden is more than 39%. In Europe, by contrast, the average corporate tax rate has now dropped below 24%. And the average corporate rate for Asia’s major economies is even lower.

…the IRS also imposes tax on income earned in other nations. Very few nations impose a system of “worldwide taxation,” mostly for the simple reason that the income already is subject to tax in the nations where it is earned.

So here’s the bottom line.

The combination of a high rate and worldwide taxation is like a one-two punch against the competitiveness of U.S.-domiciled firms, so it’s easy to understand why inversions are so attractive. They’re a very simple step to protect the interests of workers, consumers and shareholders. …Let’s hope politicians put aside class warfare and anti-business demagoguery and fix the tax system before it’s too late.

By the way, even a columnist for the New York Times agrees with me. He has a piece on the inversion issue that is not very favorable to companies, and it certainly reads like he’s in favor of governments having more money, but he can’t help but come to the right conclusion.

Ultimately, the only way inversions will stop is when the corporate tax code changes so it becomes more attractive for American companies to be American companies.

And I can’t resist closing with a great blurb from George Will’s most recent column.

Having already paid taxes on it where it was earned, the corporations sensibly resist having it taxed again by the United States’ corporate tax, the highest in the industrial world.

P.S. I’ve made the serious point that Sanders isn’t really a socialist, at least based on his voting record and what he proposes today. Instead, he’s just a conventional statist with mainstream (among leftists) views about redistribution.

Yet because he calls himself a socialist, that leads to amusing moments when other Democrats are asked to identify how he’s different. I’ve already mocked Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her inability to answer that question.

Now let’s see Hillary Clinton dance and dodge. The parts worth watching are all in the first half of the video.

Too bad Chris Matthews didn’t actually press her to answer the question. Though I’m vaguely impressed that she actually knows there are such a thing as libertarians.

P.P.S. While Hillary is clueless, there’s another Clinton that actually has some semi-sensible views about corporate taxation.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting, for instance, that the long-rumored inversion of Pfizer is moving forward.

Pfizer Inc. and Allergan PLC agreed on a historic merger deal worth more than $150 billion that would create the world’s biggest drug maker and move one of the top names in corporate America to a foreign country. …The takeover would be the largest so-called inversion ever. Such deals enable a U.S. company to move abroad and take advantage of a lower corporate tax rate elsewhere… In hooking up with Allergan, Pfizer would lower its tax rate below 20%, analysts estimate. Allergan, itself the product of a tax-lowering inversion deal, has a roughly 15% tax rate.

While there presumably will be some business synergies that will be achieved, tax policy played a big role. Here are some passages from a WSJ story late last month.

Pfizer Inc. Chief Executive Ian Read said Thursday he won’t let potential political fallout deter him from pursuing a tax-reducing takeover that could move the company’s legal address outside the U.S… Mr. Read…said he had a duty to increase or defend the value of his company, which he said is disadvantaged by the U.S. tax system.

And the report accurately noted that the United States has a corporate tax system that is needlessly and destructively punitive.

The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate—35% — in the industrialized world, and companies owe taxes on all the income they earn around the world, though they can defer U.S. taxes on foreign income until they bring the money home. In other countries, companies face lower tax rates and few if any residual taxes on moving profits across borders.

And when I said America’s tax system was “needlessly and destructively punitive,” that wasn’t just empty rhetoric.

The United States places 32nd out of the 34 OECD countries on the ITCI. There are three main drivers behind the U.S.’s low score. First, it has the highest corporate income tax rate in the OECD at 39 percent (combined marginal federal and state rates). Second, it is one of the few countries in the OECD that does not have a territorial tax system, which would exempt foreign profits earned by domestic corporations from domestic taxation. Finally, the United States loses points for having a relatively high, progressive individual income tax (combined top rate of 48.6 percent) that taxes both dividends and capital gains, albeit at a reduced rate.

Here’s the table showing overall scores and ranking for major categories.

You’ll have to scroll to the bottom portion to find the United States. And I’ve circled (in red) America’s ranking for corporate taxation and international tax rules. So perhaps it’s now easy to understand why Pfizer will be domiciled in Ireland.

By the way, while I’m a huge admirer of the Tax Foundation, I don’t fully agree with this ranking because there’s no component score for aggregate tax burden.

I don’t say that because it would boost America’s score (though that would help bump up the United States), but rather because I think it’s important to have some measure showing the degree to which resources are being diverted from the economy’s productive sector to government.

But I’m digressing. Let’s now return to the main issue of Pfizer and corporate inversions.

Remember last year when the Obama Treasury bypassed federal rule-making procedures to stop U.S. companies from moving overseas? It didn’t work. …Watching U.S. firms skedaddle, President Obama might have thought that perhaps the U.S. should stop taxing earnings generated outside its borders, since almost no one else on the planet does. Or he might have pondered whether the industrialized world’s highest corporate income tax rate is good for business. Being Barack Obama, the President naturally sought to bar companies from leaving. And his Treasury, being part of the Obama Administration, naturally skipped the normal process of proposing new rules and allowing the public to comment on them.

But even this lawless administration hasn’t been able to block inversions by regulatory edict.

…in the year since the Treasury Department “tightened its rules to reduce the tax benefits of such deals, six U.S. companies have struck inversions, compared with the nine that did so the year before.” Meanwhile, foreign takeovers of U.S. firms, which have the same effect of preventing the IRS from capturing world-wide earnings, are booming. These acquisitions exceed $379 billion so far this year, …far above any recent year before Treasury acted against inversions. So the policy won’t generate the revenue that Mr. Obama wants to collect, but it is succeeding in moving control of U.S. businesses offshore.

This should be an argument for a different approach, but Obama is too ideological to compromise on this issue.

And his leftist allies also don’t seem open to reason. Here’s some of what Jared Bernstein wrote a couple of days ago for the Washington Post.

There are three parts of his column that cry out for attention. First, he gives away his real motive by arguing that Washington should have more money.

He then makes two assertions that simply are either untrue or misleading.

For instance, he puts forth an Elizabeth Warren-type argument that firms that engage in inversions are dodging their obligation to “contribute” to the system that allows them to earn money.

…the main thing the inverting company changes here is its tax mailbox and thus where it books its profits, not its actual location. So it’s still taking advantage of our infrastructure, our markets, and our educated workforce — it’s just significantly cutting what it contributes to them.

Utter nonsense. Every inverted company (and every foreign company of any kind) pays tax to the IRS on income earned in the United States.

All that happens with an inversion is that a company no longer pays tax to the IRS on income that is earned in other nations (and already subject to tax by governments in those nations!).

Jared than argues that America’s corporate tax rate isn’t very high if you look at average tax rates.

…isn’t the problem that when it comes to corporate taxes, we’re the high-tax country?Not really. Ourstatutorycorporate tax rate (35 percent) may be higher than that in many other countries, but because of all these tax avoidance schemes, the effective corporate rate iscloser to 20 percent.

Once again, he’s off base. What matters most from an economic perspective is the marginal tax rate. Because that 35 percent marginal rate is what impacts incentives to earn more income, create more jobs, and expand investments.

And that marginal tax rate is what’s important for purposes of a company competing with a foreign competitor.

Unsurprisingly, the Obama White House doesn’t like inversions (with some suspicious exceptions) because the main effect is to reduce tax revenue. But the Administration’s efforts to thwart them haven’t been very successful.

The U.K.-based Economist has just published an article on American companies re-domiciling in jurisdictions with better tax law.

A “tax inversion” is a manoeuvre in which a (usually American) firm acquires or merges with a foreign rival, then shifts its domicile abroad to reap tax benefits. A spate of such deals last year led Barack Obama to brand inversions as “unpatriotic”. …The boardroom case for inversions stems from America’s tax exceptionalism.

But this isn’t the good kind of exceptionalism.

The internal revenue code is uniquely anti-competitive.

It levies a higher corporate-tax rate than any other rich country—a combined federal-and-state rate of 39%, against an OECD average of 25%. And it spreads its tentacles worldwide, so that profits earned abroad are also subject to American taxes when they are repatriated.

Given these facts, the Economist isn’t impressed by the Obama Administration’s regulatory efforts to block inversions.

Making it hard for American firms to invert does precisely nothing to alter the comparative tax advantages of changing domicile; it just makes it more likely that foreign firms will acquire American ones. That, indeed, is precisely what is happening.

So what’s the answer?

If American policymakers really worry about losing out to lower-tax environments, they should get rid of the loopholes that infest their tax rules, drop the corporate-income tax rate and move to a territorial system. …jobs would be less likely to flow abroad.

…companies have continued to tiptoe out of America to places where the taxman is kinder and has shorter arms. On August 6th CF Industries, a fertiliser manufacturer, and Coca-Cola Enterprises, a drinks bottler, both said they would move their domiciles to Britain after mergers with non-American firms. Five days later Terex, which makes cranes, announced a merger in which it will move to Finland. For many firms, staying in America is just too costly. Take Burger King, a fast-food chain, which last year shifted domicile to Canada after merging with Tim Horton’s, a coffee-shop operator there.

So how should Washington react to this exodus? The Economist explains once again the sensible policy response.

The logical way to stem the tide would be to bring America’s tax laws in line with international norms. Britain, Germany and Japan all have lower corporate rates and are among the majority of countries that tax firms only on profits earned on their territory.

But the Obama Administration’s response is predictably unhelpful. And may even accelerate the flight of firms.

…the US Treasury has been trying to make it harder for them to leave. …Despite such speed bumps, inversions still make enormous sense for companies with large overseas operations. If anything, the rule changes have led to more companies looking to get out before it is too late.

The Wall Street Journalopined on this issue earlier this month and reached a similar conclusion.

…a mountain of evidence that an un-competitive tax system has made the U.S. an undesirable location for corporate headquarters and investment. …high tax rates matter a great deal in determining where a company is based and where it grows.

…absent American tax reform will end up pushing more U.S. companies into foreign hands. …The ultimate losers in all of this aren’t so much the owners as American workers, who often lose their jobs when a company moves abroad. …It’s well past time for our government to stop creating advantages for foreign competitors.

In looking at this issue, it’s easy to be discouraged since the Obama Administration is unwilling to even consider pro-growth policy responses.

As such, the problem will fester until at least 2017.

But it’s possible that there could be pro-reform legislation once a new President takes office.

Particularly since the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (which used to be chaired by the clownish Sen. Levin, infamous for the FATCA disaster) has produced a very persuasive report on how bad U.S. tax policy is causing inversions.

Here are some excerpts from the executive summary.

The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, and (alone among its peers) has retained a worldwide system that taxes American companies for the privilege of repatriating their overseas earnings. Meanwhile, most other nations with advanced economies have adopted competitive tax rates and territorial-type tax systems. As a result, U.S. firms too often have a significant incentive to relocate their headquarters overseas. Corporate inversions may be the most dramatic manifestation of that incentive… The lesson policymakers should draw from our findings is straightforward: The high U.S. corporate tax rate and worldwide system of taxation are competitive disadvantages that make it easier for foreign firms to acquire American companies. Those policies also strongly incentivize cross-border merging firms, when choosing where to locate their new headquarters, not to choose the United States. The long term costs of these incentives can be measured in a loss of jobs, corporate headquarters, and revenue to the Treasury.

Those are refreshing and intelligent comments, particularly since politicians were in charge of putting out this report rather than economists.

So maybe there’s some hope for the future.

For more information on inversions and corporate tax policy, here’s a short speech I gave to an audience on Capitol Hill.

P.S. Let’s close with some political satire.

I’ve written about Bernie Sanders being a conventional statist rather than a real socialist.

But that wasn’t meant to be praise. He’s still clueless about economics, as illustrated by this amusing Venn diagram.